Checkerboards and waterboarding: Released memos outline mix of treatments for terror detainees at CIA 'black sites'

August 30, 2009|By Greg Miller, TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — Their transformations took place in a sensory cocoon: aboard a CIA aircraft, shackled in place, deprived of sight and sound by a system of blindfolds, headsets and hoods.

They emerged into an existence that the world could only wonder about for most of the past eight years, but one that is becoming possible to glimpse through dozens of declassified files.

Their days were unending, illuminated around the clock by a pair of 17-watt fluorescent bulbs. White noise from the walkways filtered through the cell walls "in the range of 56-58" decibels, about as loud as people generally talk.

There were touches of CIA hospitality. Prisoners were given books, movies and checkerboards to pass the time. They could hit the gym for exercise, and let their hair grow as long as they liked.

But there were also long, brutal stretches designed to break a prisoner's will. They were stripped, shaved and shoved against walls from the moment they arrived. What came next was an escalating menu of interrogation options, culminating in waterboarding, designed to make them believe they were in imminent danger of drowning.

The harrowing moments have been the focus of public attention. But the newest records round out those narrow accounts with fuller descriptions of what passed for everyday life.

The CIA "black sites" are empty now, if not already dismantled. They were never examined by a congressional committee or inspected by the International Red Cross.

"These papers may provide the only picture that history gets of what life was like in these facilities," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

The files released last week by the Obama administration record the bleak character of facilities that came to symbolize the nation's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Some documents show a previously undisclosed level of consideration for prisoners' well-being, but critics of the CIA program say it can't be redeemed.

"I don't think it should improve the reputation of these places, nor do I think that it will," Malinowski said. "As if feeding somebody three hot meals a day somehow compensates for being waterboarded."

The purpose of the black sites was not so much to house prisoners as to reduce them to a near-helpless state. The aim, as outlined in one document, was to teach every detainee "to perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting." The prisoners' arrival -- almost always in diapers -- was engineered to achieve that.

After being shaved, stripped and photographed nude, detainees were examined by CIA medical and psychological personnel. Then came a preliminary interrogation that would determine the prisoners' fates.

Only those considered extremely cooperative would avoid a trio of techniques designed to produce a "baseline, dependent" state: the deprivation of clothes, solid food and sleep.

Follow-up sessions would start with the prisoner standing with his back against a wall and a towel or collar wrapped around his neck to prevent whiplash. He could be thrown against the wall just once "to make a point or 20 to 30 times consecutively."

Prisoners so abhorred the repeated slamming that they would remain in so-called stress positions, such as painful kneeling postures, for hours to avoid a return to the wall, according to one Dec. 30, 2004, memo.

The rules for administering such methods were spelled out by CIA headquarters with chilling precision. Detainees could be kept in a large box for 18 hours a day, but small boxes only two hours at a time. They could be hosed with water for 15 minutes, but the air temperature had to exceed 65 degrees if they weren't given a towel.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released a series of Justice Department memos from the Bush administration that labored to find legal rationales for CIA's array of coercive interrogation methods. The documents released last week show that the agency also sought Justice Department review of the prisoners' basic conditions.

In some sections, the memos seem contradictory, describing on the one hand ways to reduce prisoners to an infant-like state, even while insisting that the agency be committed to "minimizing the physical discomfort and psychological distress that detainees are likely to suffer."